 In the movie, the filmmakers leave no doubt that this Dracula is one who is evil and must be destroyed.  This would influence later versions of Dracula movies, emphasizing the idea of Dracula as the Devil, but ignoring some of his more human aspects.

	It didn't take long for other aspects of the entertainment industry to notice the appeal of the vampire.  In the past twenty five years, many licenses have made vampires their business.  In the 1986 game Castlevania, Simon Belmont hunts through a vast castle for none other than our old friend Dracula.  That game became immensely popular and started a franchise that is still making Castlevania games to this day.  White Wolf released a role-playing game that was part of their World of Darkness series, called Vampyre:  The Masquerade, which dealt with, among other things, vampires that attempt to blend into the human world.  Like Dracula, they are attempting to masquerade as ordinary people, all the while fulfilling their plans to maintain their existence.  Unlike Dracula, however, White Wolf's vampyres are portrayed heroically, as a misunderstood people just trying to survive in a world that does not accept them, whereas Dracula is portrayed as an inhuman monster that will stop at nothing to achieve his ends, and must be destroyed at any cost.  There are even sects of people who believe, not only that vampires really exist, but that they themselves are vampires.  They will often drink the blood of willing victims in order to achieve purification.  Though generally regarded as misbegotten, perverted and weird, they are nonetheless an example of how vampires have come to affect our world today.
	Other novelists are no exception, and have followed in Dracula's footsteps, although they may have stepped off his path and created a few of their own.  From Stephen King to Tanya Huff, it has become a fictional genre all its own.  Perhaps the most popular vampire author of the day is Anne Rice, who has had several of her books on vampires adapted into movies as well, such as Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned.


	It is interesting that while Stoker used the journey to Dracula's castle in his book to generate a sense of the unknown, and thereby hopefully instilling a fear of the unknown in the reader, modern writer Rice would break down all borders and put her vampires in a familiar environment for the reader, in the hopes that they would fear the familiarity, rather than the uknown.
	Vampires have obviously come a long way over the centuries.  However, I do not think that without Bram Stoker's tale of horror, we would have the immense popularity of vampires that we do today.  Dracula came at a time when the world was just learning the value of mass communication, and the technology was starting to exist that allowed that understanding to be put into action.  Since Dracula, there has almost been an overabundance of vampire stories.  Some fare better than others, (the films Underworld and Van Helsing, for example, failed to meet many expectations) but the idea of blood-sucking undead creatures that feed on the living has touched a great many people.  Though vampire lore and mythology existed long before Bram Stoker started to pen his book, the popularity of the story of Count Dracula, Jonathan and Mina Harker, Quincy Morris, Arthur Holmwood, Lucy Westenra, Dr. Seward and Professor Van Helsing inspired an entire world of storytellers, who in turn inspired stories of their own, right down through the generations, to the point that many of us do not look past Stoker when thinking of vampire origins.  He influenced the way we think of vampires today, and so was the turning point in vampire evolution.

